While Mr. Hammel breathed harder and seemed almost ready to have an attack of asthma she folded the middy blouse neatly and put it over the back of the chair. Then before he could waste more time fiddling with her skirt she undid its single button and lowered the zipper. When she stepped out of it Mr. Hammel gasped.
Ted couldn't guest why. The rayon slip covered her almost as thoroughly as her outer clothes had. She had listened to the boys and some of the older girls in the studio talk about fetishists-whatever they were-and some of the other weirdoes encountered in the confusing and sometimes terrifying world outside the studio. Mr. Hammel had asked her to undress so she was going to undress. Without any of the coaxing or long, slow buildup he had engineered in his dream production of this incident, she crossed her hands and whipped her slip off over her head with a minimum of hair-mussing.
Mr. Hammel's face was very red. He was breathing as if he had a chicken bone lodged in his throat. Ted posed before him in single-buckle, black patent leather "little girl" shoes. She wore white ankle length socks and pink rayon panties. From the waist up she wore only a ribbon in her hair. Her tiny breast buds were just sprouting, making her nipples stand out a half inch from her thin muscular chest. Her small, slight body was as trim as seven years of constant exercise could make it. She was still a virgin.
Mr. Hammel just stared. Ted waited for him to say something. When he didn't she paused another moment, then grasped the back of the chair and twisted her slight, muscular body into the First Position. Still Mr. Hammel stared.
Slowly, Ted worked through all the classic positions, showing off her expertise to a man who would not have known a ballerina from a B-girl. When she was finished he still sat red-faced and gasping behind his desk. Ted wondered what she ought to do next. Mr. Sprague had told her to be nice to him. Was she supposed to make him fudge…?
The man behind the desk finally found his voice. "Uh," he began, "how old are you?"
"Twelve. I'll be thirteen in June."
Clearly, Mr. Hammel was undecided about something. "I, uh-" He cleared his throat and tried again. "I've heard you people in show business look at things differently, from the rest of us."
"What things?"
"Oh, uh-" He paused and swallowed again. "Things like taking your clothes off."
Ted wondered what he meant. "Do you want me to take off my shoes and socks?" she asked.
Apparently that was not exactly what Mr. Hammel had had in mind.
Ted was used to shedding her panties. They made a line and bulged in the wrong places if she left them on under a ballet costume. But nobody in the studio had ever asked her to take them off in front of everybody. Still… Mr. Sprague had told her to be nice to Mr. Hammel. Maybe he wanted to check up on how mature she was.
Mr. Hammel had finally found his voice again. "This show may run several years," he explained. "And we can't have any sixteen-year-old twelve-year-olds turning matronly in the middle of the season."
"You want to see if I have any hair down there," Ted translated. Before he could answer she matter-of-factly peeled down her pink rayon panties. Bent over, she thought a moment, then took them the rest of the way off from around her ankles. Clad only in her black patent leather "little girl" shoes, white ankle socks, and a pink hair ribbon, she went through the ballet positions again.
Mr. Hammel's asthma seemed to be getting worse. His face was pink and he was breathing with great difficulty. Ted finished twisting her slight nude body through the positions and asked, "Is there anything else you want to see?"
There wasn't. Mr. Hammel had been dreaming and wanting to see something very like what he was seeing at this moment ever since he had been twelve himself and very close to seeing it until the neighbor girl's mother had come home at an inopportune moment. He couldn't trust himself to speak. Choking, trying to control his breathing, he gestured toward the couch.
Still clad only in white anklets, black patent leather shoes, and a hair ribbon, Ted sat on the edge of the couch. After a moment Mr. Hammel came to sit beside her. He didn't sit very close. He seemed almost afraid to touch her. "Uh," he began, "uh, you want this part real bad?"
"I guess so," Ted said. "It could help start my career."
Mr. Hammel put a timid hand on her thigh. Ted had felt so many men's hands on her body twisting her this way and that, pushing her ass in, pulling it out, making her suck in her tummy that another man's hand on her leg was no big deal. But she was twelve and not totally stupid. She began to suspect what was on Mr. Hammel's mind. It didn't shock her. It only surprised her somewhat. She was twelve-just starting to sprout and there were other girls in the company with very nice little bodies, girls sixteen, eighteen, even in their-twenties. "Did you know," she asked, "that girls who want to be really good dancers have to be virgins?"
Mr. Hammel's hand came off her thigh. "Why?" he asked.
"I don't know. It's something to do with stretching your bones out of shape or getting pregnant or something. But I know it's true. Everybody tells me."
"Isn't it awfully hard to live up to?" Mr. Hammel asked.
Ted shrugged. "Maybe someday. Not now. I don't really care about it that much." To her mild surprise she found she was starting to care more than she ever had before. Something about sitting here naked on the couch beside Mr. Hammel was more wickedly exciting than anything she had ever experienced in all her twelve years. She wondered what it would feel like it Mr. Hammel were to take off his clothes too and lie down on top of her and stick his thing inside that little slit that had never had anything inside it except dust from the practice floor and lint from her ballet tights whenever she half tore herself in two doing the splits.
She thought about how it felt when she let her legs spread wide apart, so wide that the hairless lips of her vulva spread wide apart and her tiny, still-unlicked clitoris rubbed against the seam that ran up the middle of tights. It tickled and made her feel warm and giggly all over. She had often wondered if the other girls had experienced the same sensation when their cunts opened. She had heard stories from other girls her age about putting a finger down there and tickling until Something Nice happened.
Ted had always intended to try it herself some day but six hours at the bar were enough to send her home ready for bed every night. Somehow she had never gotten around to it. Being a dancer, no matter what aging satyrs like Mr. Hammel might think, was hard work.
"It must be an exacting profession," he said.
Ted didn't understand what exacting meant.
"Hard work," Mr. Hammel explained. "Why don't you just lie down and take a little rest on the couch and I'll do some nice things to make you feel better."
"I was a virgin when I came in here," Ted said.
"Don't worry," Mr. Hammel consoled. "You'll still be one when you walk out with a contract for that part."
Ted swung her thin muscular legs up onto the couch and lay back. Though she had never been fucked, she knew how it was done. Mr. Hammel was a grown man but he was also flabby. If he tried to climb between her legs he just might find his neck in a scissors grip he would never forget.
But she soon discovered she didn't have to worry. Mr. Hammel didn't try to get on top of her and force his way between her legs. Instead, he knelt on the floor beside the couch and began kissing her tiny, hard-muscled belly.
Ted sighed at the memory. It had been twenty-seven years since poor Mr. Hammel had buried his face in her immature belly and… At thirty-nine her body had finally made it to what most girls had at twenty. Standing in shorts and halter bracing herself at the windward sidestay she knew she could stiffen every prick in the yacht basin-and especially the fourteen-year-old's who was steering. She wondered if the other boy was grown up enough to think about girls.